facts. It will be seen that the note from the Bookseller to the Reader[1] gives the order of events perfectly accurately.
In another sense there is no doubt that Swift was in the right. In the matter of the Epistles of Phalaris, Temple and Swift were completely in the wrong; but Bentley's edition of Paradise Lost showed (much later, it is true) the absurdities into which even his acute intellect might be tempted by his self-sufficiency and lack of taste. Bentley's chief interest in the classics was philological and historical rather than literary; and so far as Swift's book was a protest against pedantry it was on the right side. But the protest would have come better from one who had some pretence to equal Bentley in scholarship.
(d) Suggested Sources
Writing in 1705 Wotton said, *I have been assured that the Battle in St. James's Library is mutatis mutandis taken out of a French book entitled Combat des Livres, if I misremember not.'[2] The
